aka - My Home Assistant Green Setup Journey
Okay, @code-in-progress is really only marginally responsible for my broken toe, but it was part of the process of setting up my Home Assistant Green. As of posting this, I’m 2 weeks away from being recovered from this broken bone. And so far, it’s the only bone broken!! 
“Wait, our community manager doesn’t actively use Home Assistant?” 
It’s my biggest shame in my role but I am finally in a position to commit time to this. I have a few small automations I can set up in my house now that I have a couple smart switches, a few Apollo Automation devices, and some motion/presence detectors; I’ll leave the links to those at the bottom of this post. This story is a wild ride that I wanted to share with you all as I move through this journey, stick with me. (And there will be updates, I am not even close to finished…)
Let me start with advice for new users to share the frustrations I ran into so hopefully y’all don’t run into these, too.
- Buy a Home Assistant Green if you are new to tinkering with electronics. THIS IS NOT AN AD, I PROMISE. I’m familiar with tinkering, have several Raspberry Pi devices and a Green, and the Green is by far the easiest way to get started because you don’t have to install the Pi Installer to flash SD cards.
- Get a good SD card. Much like hard drives for PCs, the cheaper you go, the quality drops significantly. If you want your device to respond quickly, go for a higher quality SD card. Look on the web for articles like this or for forums/Reddit posts talking about good quality SD cards to help you decide which one you should get. (To clarify, you only need this if you go the Pi route. Thanks @SonomaGTS for calling out this wasn’t clear. :3)
- If you want to set up anything Bluetooth that isn’t connected through one of your big box devices (Google, Alexa, Apple), you have two options. I found here on our forums an adapter that I plan on using (haven’t set it up yet, but the link will be in the hardware list below). You can also set up BT proxies with ESPHome - I will go over that more later, because it was one of the biggest headaches I ran into.
- Expect road bumps. Seriously. I do not believe your technical level matters too much in this case, because I have seen very technical people get stuck at a variety of steps from beginner’s to very advanced setups. Prepare for a little pain.
- Watch our release party live streams before you get started to reduce that pain. I will say that being involved in the release parties really helps me understand how to use Home Assistant in a way that I do not feel videos or documentation can. The reason why I suggest this is mostly because you will get the most current information about HA and you get the opportunity to ask the people working on it questions live.
I think that sums up my biggest pain points (aside from my foot) fairly well. Now for the meat of my journey!
It begins…
This (not short) story starts with me breaking my foot while trying to set up the Apollo Automation devices at the beginning of July. I figured this would be the easiest place to start, but joke’s on me. I do not suggest new users go this route, I suggest starting with devices like door or motion sensors, or lights. I immediately ran into issues with my AIR-1 not properly installing the image within ESPHome in HA - ENTER BILL. I “followed” the steps Apollo provides (more on that later) but the AIR still refused to show me its entities in Home Assistant no matter how many times I tried to install. I am way too frustrated at this point. Bill, in his infinite patience, tries to walk me through accessing the boot button on the AIR and tells me I need a hex key to open the device to access it. I throw an exasperated GIF into our chat and go into my garage to find the hex key set I have. After I already left my office, Bill then tells me I don’t actually need it. It was too late, I was on a grand adventure.
My garage is probably like yours - there is junk piled up in one section that we want to sell but haven’t yet, making it impossible for me to access the toolbox I needed. I am the shortest adult in the house and the others could reach it without issue, but neither of those adults were home at the time. I start moving things around to help me reach the toolbox, and I find a good solid place to put my feet flat without climbing on things. In retrospect, maybe it would have been better if I just tried to climb up the pile. 
As I’m trying to push the lawn mower to the side, I feel something crawl across my foot and, much like any other person in my situation, I pull my foot up to shake whatever it was off…
…straight into the metal bar of the door frame pull-up bar I found my footing in. I immediately realized I caused a ton of damage to my foot, but still managed to get through the doom pile and got the hex keys. I came back to Bill’s message about it not being needed and told him that I am pretty sure I broke my foot getting that tool I did not need. 
Needless to say, I decided I was not going to come back to Home Assistant that day. Or that week. I was too flustered to understand or follow any more steps, my foot hurt, I was done.
Great opening to my journey, right?
This story picks back up the weekend of July 26th, my foot finally feels stable enough for me to do a lot of moving around while I am testing stuff I try to hook up. I decided to tackle the AIR first (again). I feel confident - I was told the image should be fixed, I know how to reset the device, I CAN DO THIS.
You know what’s gonna happen here…
I (first) was not hitting the correct boot button on my AIR. It took me maybe 3 times of trying to re-image it before I realized I was probably doing it wrong. I turned my device upside down and do the boot mode steps again - something different actually happens in ESPHome! And then HA tells me there’s an update for it!! 
Finally getting somewhere.
Except I still don’t see entities. 
Bill is super confused by this, and it means that the flash didn’t work again. He asks me to click EDIT on the device in ESPHome to look at the YAML only to find it’s missing the packages: line, meaning it’s not pulling anything from GitHub.
Jeez, okay, I need a break from these devices now. I have other things I can focus on that I think will be less stressful or difficult. Let’s look at the bluetooth stuff I need now. 
This lasted maybe 10 minutes, I am not kidding. I took one look at the BT proxy page, realized that I had no idea what to look for with regards to “ESP32” devices, and actively gave up. It was entirely too overwhelming for me at the time. For now, I decide to just go with the adapter I found and will complicate things at a later time. (Grateful to my lead, Guy, who helped me out this week after I aired my frustrations about that at him. Once I get that project up and running, I will probably have a separate post.)
Back to the Apollo devices…
So Bill attempts to walk me through installing the image manually while I am in another chat ranting at my team about my struggles - it had been 5 hours at this point. One thing I am upset about is that the bottom of Apollo’s installation instructions doesn’t point to manually installing if the Home Assistant method doesn’t work, it just suggests going to Discord. I was absolutely upset at the wrong thing here…
I later realized I missed that these steps Bill was walking me through were at the top of the page, the whole time. I did the most New User thing I could have done - I saw that there was a way to use HA to install it and assumed it would be better, completely ignoring the manual steps above the HA steps that Bill had to walk me through. I was also so frustrated I couldn’t grasp on to what he meant when he told me to connect to its hotspot - if only I started with the top of the page… 
We successfully get things installed properly following the manual instructions. FINALLY I can see entities for my AIR. Hot damn, the manual installation is so smooth, I cursed myself for making things harder on myself by not reading but I HAVE ENTITIES. I proceeded to go through my MSR-2 and MTR-1 installations in a breeze with the manual installation and set those up within 30 minutes.
Seriously, why didn’t I read the whole Getting Started page? I don’t know. I can only assume someone else would do this, too. Hopefully someone learns from my inability to read. All I did was manage to put myself through an autistic meltdown. 
I then try to calibrate the AIR so that I can set it up. It never shows up as online while plugged in outside. I try another outdoor access. No go. It works just fine in my office, though! Well, turns out I got a revision of the AIR’s board that had copper soldered too close to the wifi chip and uh it kind of makes it useless. But I didn’t know that until I talked to Justin at Apollo. I guess I can’t continue with that project yet. Today I got the replacement, huge thanks to the guys at Apollo for helping this newbie. 
That was just one day…
Alright day one down, onto the next! 
This time I decided to start with ELECTRICAL, YEAH. I want to install a couple smart switches I have but my house doesn’t have any of the wires labeled in any of the gangs installed in my walls - a problem when you are trying to upgrade from regular switches. This process included not only looking up how to test wires in my wall, but how to use the manual multimeter I bought for it. Did you know most instructions for testing electrical assume you have an automatic multimeter and don’t account for manual devices? I didn’t! Luckily, it really doesn’t take me long to figure this out.
The 2-gang I decided to try to install my first ever smart switch in probably wasn’t the best way to start. Identifying the load and line wires wasn’t hard at all - figuring out which neutral and load wires I needed to get the smart switch set up was a different thing. 
Thankfully my breaker box and this switch are in rooms next to each other so going back and forth to turn the power on and off for the room wasn’t awful but I did it so much to test things out. Using the way the smart switch’s instructions displayed the wiring, and after trying a few different wire connections in this 2-gang box, I think I figured out how to get things hooked up finally. I turn the power on, and the breaker pops the second I turn it on. Welp, okay. I successfully hooked it all back up the way it was, and made a plan to try on a 1-gang switch in another room to see if it was maybe just the amount of wires to choose from for me.
That project didn’t fail, but I did learn a lot! I have more I can try, and if I need to I have a friend who’s an electrician who can check things out for me. Next thing to tackle - the new thermostat.
I only have a heating/air unit in my house because I live in the Pacific Northwest and infrastructure here was built for a climate that no longer exists! The thermostat that’s in this house is probably the one that was built into it 20 years ago, and I assume replacing it will help me control it better. One thing I was hoping to fix was that my air seemed to come on at random times, even when the entire thermostat was off. It had baffled me for two years. The process of replacing my thermostat helped me discover a “feature” of my unit: “fresh air intake”; and it has a timer on it at the top of the unit behind one of the vents near the ceiling in my garage. No wonder I didn’t notice this! I put that to the back of my head, no time for this just yet because I am on a mission.
I kill the power to where the heating unit and the thermostat are and start pulling things out. I have a bunch of cool wires in the hole for the thermostat electrical that aren’t labeled but at least these ones are colored. I look up what seems to be a good source of what HVAC wiring colors should be and attempt to label them. I am pretty sure I did this all wrong. No manner of hooking up the wires I think I have to this thermostat is giving it power. Well, shit, okay there’s another thing I need my electrician friend to help with. I hook the old thermostat back up and it works just fine…
See? That’s why I am pretty sure I am doing things right - I suppose I am just at the point that I need an expert to come look at my electrical. I gave up for the weekend here, as it had been hours of standing while wearing an ortho walking boot and working on electrical that day for me.
…except what about that timer on my heating unit? I have to scratch that itch before I fully give up! I grab the manual for it, which is still available in a metal pocket on it despite it being a 20 year old unit, and the front pages explain what that fresh air intake timer thing is. What the hell. This thing has been pulling in air into my house just on a random schedule?? Like the 85F+ air we’ve had most of this summer?? Or all the allergens from the spring?? The freezing, humid air of the winter??? Jeez, things makes so much more sense to me suddenly, so I turn off the fresh air intake after learning how to set the timer.
(I would like to warn people here: I turned this off because we often have our windows open, the house is very well ventilated. This fresh air intake is beneficial for people who can’t have windows open and need to have their air recycled to reduce CO2 in their homes. Please take that into consideration if you discover you have one of these.)
And that’s where I am!
Completely nowhere, yet so much has been done. I will get back to trying to set stuff up because I do have lots of tech I can do something with now. Here are my plans:
- Automate the mud room light with door sensors and a presence sensor. I want the light to stay off unless one of the doors is open, or if the presence sensor sees a body in the room with both doors closed. This is the room my smart switch is supposed to be used in, but I might just go with a smart bulb in there instead.
- Send the robot vacuum into my office when the cats use the litter box here. I have sensory issues and litter across the hard floors is a nightmare. I want to use a presence sensor where only the cats will trigger it, have it wait for 2 passes, wait a few minutes, and then send in the vacuum to clean up the hard floor section.
- Automate the lights on the front of my house. We don’t have a lot of street lights where I live, and I have bushes and trees that block the little light available on the path to my porch. Not to mention it gets dark up here around 4pm in the winter. I want to use a motion sensor to tell my front patio light and some path lights (yet to be bought) to turn on for a specific time frame.
I know these are all small potatoes compared to what some of y’all have done. More plans include integrating our Echo devices via Home Assistant Cloud and setting up a Zigbee mesh network with some plugs and the SkyConnect (now ZBT-1). I am also looking into how to contribute to the project directly by adding in a new language! This means I’m going to have to get more of my voice stuff set up eventually, too. 
Here’s all the hardware I have right now, if you are looking to buy products that the community has shown me works (and I’ll for sure update this thread with my thoughts):
- Smart light switch by Hubspace
- THIRDREALITY motion sensors (Zigbee)
- Aqara door sensors
- THIRDREALITY Zigbee smart plugs
- Aqara Motion Sensor P1
- Long range bluetooth adapter (for some bluetooth speakers - I know I am wading into dark waters here…)
- Honeywell T5 thermostat
- Apollo Automation devices (to be clear, these were given to me for testing purposes)
I managed to write a novel here and it’s essentially only chapter 1! I am going to tackle things again this weekend, so I will very likely have an update next week for y’all. 
I’ll leave you with these questions: What’s the hardest project you built (or tried to build) in Home Assistant? Did you solve it? Is it still sitting off to the side, judging you as you work on other things? Let us share each other’s struggles! 
Welcome to what I am now just considering blog-style updates in this thread…
I even measured to make sure it would be within what the booklet says! Ugh. I pull them off the doors and frames they are stuck to, remove the sticky from the devices, and that is now where I am. Next I will be moving my Green and the SkyConnect to a more central location on my second floor - I have an ethernet cable more than long enough to do this; and setting up the door sensors closer to each other on their respective doors. I now have 6 WiZ lights on their way to me, which means I will be able to automate the mud room light tomorrow! 
Especially when we get questions from friends who wants to start with smart home - it is easy to forget how troublesome a simple task can be at times. I still tell those who ask that Home Assistant is the right system for those who wants all options open, but also add that you get a new hobby at the same time. If you want something that just works you have to choose a brand and stick to it.
Keep up the good work, and get you electrician friend to check your work. I most of Europe we are not allowed to do anything like that ourselves. Stay safe. 
I think that is why they come with an extra sticky.